I just happened to be reading a book on the philosophy of science, “Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk”, by Massimo Pigliucci (University of Chicago Press, 2010, ISBN-13: 978-0-226-66785-0, ISBN-10: 0-226-66785-5).   And, there on page 195 is something that I had once donated to society.  (Via a Creative Commons license, even.)

It’s talking about the problem of induction,  asking how do we know the premises from which we argue logically:

Premise 1: All men are mortal.
Premise 2: Socrates is a man.
Conclusion: Socrates is mortal.

If we have good reasons to believe the first two premises, the conclusion is inescapable.  And, of course Socrates did die, by order of the Athenian government, in 399 BCE.

But, says Hume, how do we know that the two premises are, in fact, true?  Socrates could have been a woman or an alien from outer space (Hume did not use these specific examples); and it is at least theoretically possible that not all men are mortal… .  Hume’s answer was that we can know these things only through direct observations (sense data) or induction, the process of generalizing from a number of observations (more sense data) to broader instances. …

Hume didn’t use these specific examples, but I did, in lecture notes to a course at Oxford in 2004.  At least, I think it was my idea: a google search on “socrates female mortal alien” only turns up those words with that meaning on my web page.

All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore Socrates is mortal.

Fine and good, but are we sure that Socrates was a man? Isn’t there just the teeniest chance that he was a cross-dressing woman or a alien xeno-anthropologist doing some fieldwork?  Do we know that all men are mortal?  Some of us aren’t dead yet after all, so we are not proven to be mortal. Other than simply ignoring such quibbles and pretending that you didn’t hear them, what option do you have?

So, what?   First of all, I’m happy that people are reading it and thinking about it.  That’s why I put it on the web.  And this is not something I’d expect a reference for: he and I were making an old argument that has been made many times before, and the cross-dressing aliens (or whatever) were merely decoration.

The interesting bit is to see information flowing underground from brain to brain.  I doubt that Massimo Pigliucci remembers where the idea of women and aliens comes from.  It was just something he read, one of thousands of things that contributed to his book.  Longfellow captures the way ideas move in words that are painfully soppy to my ear:

I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For, so swiftly it flew, the sight
Could not follow it in its flight.

I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For who has sight so keen and strong,
That it can follow the flight of song?

Long, long afterward, in an oak
I found the arrow, still unbroke;
And the song, from beginning to end,
I found again in the heart of a friend.

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) , from The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems, published 1846.

When Longfellow breathed his poem into the air, I suppose he would not have been surprised to find this:

I sneezed a sneeze into the air;
It fell to earth I know not where;
But hard and cold were the looks of those
In whose vicinity I snoze.

Author unknown, sometime before 1937 (published in The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 12, Issue 7, October 1, 1937.)

And, the mysterious author of that last little gem: would he be surprised to see it being used in a blog post about the decline of blogging and the rise of Facebook? (For those of you in 2020, Facebook pushed stuff you wrote to a list of “friends”):

Facebook and the slow death of blogs

…
I have noticed that the bloggers in my family (including me) don’t “blog” as much as we used to. Our limited time for such stuff is being consumed by Facebook, where you can make editorial comments like this one knowing who your audience will be.

Writing on a blog reminds me of the classic poem, “I sneezed a sneeze into the air. It fell to Earth I knew not where, but hard and cold were the looks of those in whose vicinity I snoze.” I don’t know who will read this – if anyone – but I know my “friends” in Facebook will see my little status updates and photos I put in my album, and I’ll see theirs.

A guy named “Al”: http://awscom.blogspot.com/2009/04/facebook-and-slow-death-of-blogs.html

So, where will these ideas pop up next?   Keep a lookout for Socrates & female & alien, or Longfellow.